Health Tips

According to IPP Media , there are a minimum of “300 million acute cases of malaria…each year” around the world. Malaria, which is Africa’s number 1 killer disease, results in over 1 million deaths internationally. As many as 800,000 or 80 percent take place in Africa south of the Sahara, and the victims are primarily “children under five years of age”

In 2006, malaria is estimated by the World Health Organization to have killed more than 880,000 people and infected about 247 million people globally.

Hence, Africa gets one of the best news the continent has received in decades, when news came out that we are closer to a vaccine for malaria. The news came out on Monday, December 8, 2008, from researchers withGlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a pharmaceutical company based in the United Kingdom (Great Britain) and the United States.
The news release says the vaccine proved most effective in infants younger than 12 months; each infant received 3 doses of the vaccine. Months ago, there was similar vaccine given to kids between the ages of 5 months and 17 months. The result? A “strong immune response in half of the 800 children in the study”. The test vaccines were given to children in Mozambique, a country of more than 19 million people, located in Southeastern Africa, between South Africa and Tanzania.

GSK expects to begin “more extensive testing…early next year.”

During a teleconference from New Orleans, Dr. Christian Loucq, who directs the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative, said the results of the current experiment “add to our confidence that we are closer than ever before”.

This news prompts me to recall my bouts with malaria as a little boy growing up in Liberia. We fanned off mosquitoes, those friendly blood suckers and carriers of the disease, using mosquito coils, sometimes mosquito sprays. Once we contracted malaria, the treatment was Chloroquine, a medication to which many of us developed allergy

in the form of persistent itching. In recent years when I returned to Ghana, Kenya, and Liberia, I found that mosquito nets have become a hot weapon in the fight against malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Call the GSK experimental malaria vaccine a Christmas present for Africa. And how I wish that Africa’s little ones with malaria-infested surroundings will get the news during this season of giving that help is finally on the way! Meanwhile, they need to keep those mosquito coils burning, keep those mosquito sprays spewing, and keep those mosquito nets up. That is, for those African families who can afford the mosquito coil, spray or net.

Thanks GlaxoSmithKline for your determination to confront and conquer Africa’s malaria nightmare. Millions of Africans are waiting for the real thing, which we believeGSK or a competitor will develop in the very new future.